Field of the Invention
The present invention is related to a content providing system, a content providing device, a client device, a control method, and a storage medium, and in particular to a content service provided via a network.
Description of the Related Art
Client devices such as personal computers (PCs) that can connect to a network are widespread. Due to the pervasiveness of these kinds of devices, the network population on the Internet is increasing. In recent years, various services that use the Internet have been deployed, and entertainment services, such as games and the like, have been provided.
Amongst the services for network users, are so called online game services such as MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games), for example. For example, a user, by launching a browsing application n a client device and connecting to a service providing server, can enjoy contents provided by such an online game service.
Amongst the online game services, there are services in which display of advertisements is made a condition of the provision of the content. The methods of displaying the advertisements can take many forms, but in every case is the condition that the advertisement be forcedly displayed simultaneously with the content. However, in simultaneously displaying an advertisement during the provision of content, it may bring about the following kind of bothersome situations for the user of the content. For example, there are cases in which the display of an advertisement causes the display area of the content to be narrower. Also, because processing resources for the display of the content are divided due to the update processing for displaying the advertisement, a delay, etcetera, in the display of the content could occur. In order to alleviate the drawbacks of this kind of displaying of advertisements, Japanese Patent Laid-open No. 2008-040622 discloses means of providing advertisements in which a user can select whether the timing of the display of a pop up advertisement is before, during or after the playback of the content.
However, in the case where, as in Japanese Patent Laid-open No. 2008-040622, the advertisement is played back before the content or particularly in the case where the advertisement is played back after the content, there is the possibility that the user will purposely not watch the display of the advertisement. In this case, the effect that advertisers wish to achieve with the advertisement cannot be achieved making the form of provision unappealing to advertisers.
Also, in the case where an advertisement is displayed during the playback of the main content, in order to prevent the above mentioned problems regarding simultaneous display, a form of displaying advertisements is conceivable in which the content is temporarily paused and the advertisement is displayed as has been done in television broadcasting. The timing of display of advertisements in television broadcasting is intentionally set to match the structure of the program by the producers of the content. However, with video distribution services that use the Internet, for example, an enormous number of videos are provided to users as content. Because it is not realistic for producers/service operators to set the advertisement display timing for such an enormous amount of content, normally the display timing of advertisements is set based on a specific criteria.
However, in the case where the advertisement display timing is automatically set in this way, the pausing of the playback of the main content in order to display advertisements has no relation to the substance of the content being displayed. For this reason, it is possible that the user's interest will be dampened. Meanwhile, in particular, in the case of interactive content such as online game services, because the progress of the content changes depending on the user, automatically setting the advertisement display timing is fraught with difficulty.